A PIECE OF CAKE. Trisha Ashley

me, just in case, though so far I’ve never needed to use it.’

      ‘The venue for the reception is a bit of a drive from here. When will you take the cake over there?’

      ‘Since I’m your one and only bridesmaid, it will be easier for me if I can take it the day before. Otherwise, it would have to be the crack of dawn, so I can dash back and change.’

      ‘I’ll phone them and ask, but I’m sure they’ll be fine about you delivering it the day before – and I’ll come and help you,’ she offered, then paused and asked, hopefully, ‘I don’t suppose you’re free for the next couple of hours?’

      ‘I suppose I am between jobs at the moment, because I’ve just baked the cakes for my next commission. Why?’ I asked suspiciously. ‘What do you want me to do?’

      ‘Nothing much, it’s just that I’ve got hundreds of little silver organza wedding favour bags in the boot of the car, and boxes of stuff to go into them, and I hoped you might give me a hand …? It would be much more fun if we did them together.’

      ‘Fetch them in,’ I said resignedly, and actually it was fun filling them with foil-wrapped chocolate hearts, balloons, bubble-blowing bottles in the shape of three-tiered wedding cakes and silver and gold-covered dragées, especially since afterwards we ate all the leftover chocolates.

      *

      We’d arranged that Laura would come over on the afternoon before the wedding, to help me take the cake to the reception venue, but instead, to my surprise, when I opened the door I found Wes Rufford standing on the doorstep, looking like an advert for expensive aftershave.

      I thought I’d imagined him for a couple of minutes, for I have to admit that he’d haunted my dreams a few times since I’d met him, though of course I’m not responsible for what goes on in my unconscious.

      But it really was him and today he didn’t look so much tall, dark and handsome, as tall, dark and anxious.

      ‘Hi Kate,’ he said nervously, ‘it’s me, Wes.’

      ‘Yes, I remember you,’ I said. ‘In fact, given what happened last time we met, I’m hardly likely to forget you, am I?’

      ‘Probably not,’ he agreed and then offered me a tentative smile. ‘Laura had a few last minute things to do, so she rang me to ask if I’d mind giving you a hand with the cake, instead.’

      ‘I suppose you’d better come in, then,’ I said, grudgingly. ‘I don’t suppose you know the way to the venue, do you? Only that would be really useful, because my sat nav thinks it’s hundreds of miles away in the south of England, but Laura said it was barely over the county border into Cheshire.’

      ‘Actually, I do know, because I went there to suss it out with Harry when they were first searching for somewhere to have the reception. It’s a lovely old house, but well off the beaten track. I could drive you there?’ he offered.

      ‘I’d rather take my van, because I can secure the cake safely in it. It’s already packed up and ready to go with everything I need to assemble it when I get there.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

      I became conscious that I was still wearing my sugar-frosted pinny and holding an icing bag in one hand. ‘Come through. I wasn’t expecting Laura for half an hour or so and I was just finishing off a cake for another customer.’

      ‘I know I’m a bit early,’ he apologised. ‘I hope I’m not in the way.’

      I pointed the nozzle at a kitchen chair and said, ‘Just sit there while I do this and don’t distract me.’

      He made a gesture of zipping his mouth closed and meekly sat where I’d told him.

      Luckily there were just finishing touches to add to the smallest tier of the horseshoe-shaped cake I’d been icing, so I did those and then put it under a cover, next to the other two layers.

      ‘That looks very pretty,’ he said, when I’d released him from his vow of silence. ‘It’s unusual to see a blue wedding cake.’

      ‘The bride’s favourite colour is that Wedgwood blue and the cake is horseshoe shaped because she runs a riding school. Her fiancé is the local blacksmith, so it’s a marriage made in heaven,’ I added.

      ‘Forged to last?’ he joked.

      ‘And that,’ I agreed, switching the kettle on to make a cup of coffee before we set out. When I turned, I caught him looking curiously round my kitchen.

      ‘This isn’t at all how I imagined it would be – I thought you’d have a much bigger area to work in and yet here you are in a tiny cottage kitchen!’

      ‘The house belongs to my parents – they bought it as an investment years ago and when the last tenants moved out, I moved in and started up my business here on a small scale.’

      ‘But Laura says you’re very successful now?’

      ‘The orders book is pretty full, but it’s taken some time to build up to that. And now I suppose I’m a victim of my own success, because I need bigger premises, but I haven’t really had time to look for anything.’

      ‘I like the area round here. I’ve been looking for somewhere quiet to live and ideally I want a little bit of land, or a big garden, so I could keep hens and grow vegetables, that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘But near Knutsford, where I’m living now, the prices are sky high.’

      ‘That’s because all those overpaid footballers are living there,’ I said dryly.

      ‘Touché!’ He smiled at me wryly. ‘You know, I’ve thought about you a lot since we met, Kate.’

      ‘Have you?’ I said, trying to sound casual, though I admit my heart did a little flip and I was probably blushing. I’d forgotten quite how attractive he was …

      But then I remembered all those photos I’d seen of him at parties, draped in stick-thin blondes, and got a grip on myself. ‘I thought you’d be too busy playing with your friends, on and off the field,’ I said, making it sound as if he was ten and playing tag with his gang until his mum called him in for tea.

      ‘I work hard, but I don’t play hard. I’m not a party animal.’

      ‘Really? That’s odd, because I saw some recent Hello! magazine pictures of you in a nightclub, with a lot of girls. You looked as if you were having a good time.’

      ‘I didn’t have you down as a Hello! reader, somehow,’ he said pensively.

      ‘I’m not, but it’s my hairdresser’s favourite magazine, so the only thing to read when I’m there. You seem to feature a lot.’

      ‘Well, that one was a teammate’s birthday bash. I only showed my face for half an hour and I’ve no idea who the girls were,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t always as they appear in the press.’

      ‘I suppose not,’ I conceded.

      ‘Look Kate, I know we got off on the wrong foot right from the start, so I’m not surprised you’ve got the wrong impression of me, but you never really gave me the chance to say sorry about what happened at the reception. It was just one of those stupid things. None of us appreciated how much time and effort it had taken you to make all those little cakes. When Laura explained, I could see why you’d had a severe sense of humour failure.’

      ‘I’ve got a perfectly good sense of humour,’ I said with dignity. ‘But I thought you all behaved like a gang of idiotic adolescents and it was a waste of good food, so there was nothing funny about it that I could see.’

      ‘Of course not,’ he said quickly and was so contrite that by the time we’d stowed the cake away in my van, which is a small white one with ‘Kate’s Cakes’ lettered up the side in gold, and I’d driven him to the reception venue, we were chatting in a much friendlier way.